Unit 7: Period 7: 1890 to 1945

22 terms. Say what each one means, then open the card to check.

• Yellow journalism

  Sensational, often exaggerated newspaper reporting meant to sell papers; in the 1890s it stirred public anger at Spain over Cuba.

  Example. Newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer ran lurid stories of Spanish cruelty in Cuba in the years before 1898.

• Anti-Imperialist League

  A group formed in 1898 to oppose taking overseas colonies, especially the Philippines, on moral, constitutional, economic and racial grounds.

  Example. Mark Twain, a vice president of the league, mocked the war in the Philippines in his 1901 essay 'To the Person Sitting in Darkness'.

• Open Door policy

  The U.S. call, in notes by Secretary of State John Hay in 1899 and 1900, for every nation to trade in China on equal terms and for China to stay whole.

  Example. During the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, Hay's second note asked the powers to respect China's territory instead of carving it up.

• Roosevelt Corollary

  Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 addition to the Monroe Doctrine, claiming a U.S. right to intervene in Latin American nations that could not keep order or pay their debts.

  Example. Later presidents carried the policy further: U.S. Marines occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924.

• Muckrakers

  Journalists of the early 1900s who exposed corruption and abuses in business and government to push for reform.

  Example. Lincoln Steffens's articles, collected as The Shame of the Cities (1904), showed how city bosses traded favors for votes.

• Initiative, referendum and recall

  Progressive reforms that let voters propose laws, approve or reject laws directly, and remove officials before their terms end.

  Example. Oregon adopted the initiative and referendum in 1902, and many western states soon followed its lead.

• Seventeenth Amendment

  The 1913 amendment that had the voters of each state, rather than the state legislature, elect U.S. senators.

  Example. Before 1913 some legislatures deadlocked so long over a Senate seat that it sat empty; Delaware went without a full delegation for years.

• Square Deal

  Theodore Roosevelt's promise of fair treatment for business, labor and consumers, backed by regulation, antitrust suits and conservation.

  Example. In the 1902 coal strike, Roosevelt pressed mine owners and miners into arbitration instead of simply sending troops against the strikers.

• Great Migration

  The movement of millions of Black Southerners to northern and western cities from the 1910s on, for jobs and to escape Jim Crow.

  Example. Chicago's Black population more than doubled between 1910 and 1920 as families arrived from Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

• Espionage and Sedition Acts

  Wartime laws of 1917 and 1918 that punished interfering with the draft or the war effort and, under the Sedition Act, disloyal speech or writing.

  Example. Socialist leader Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison in 1918 for a speech against the war.

• Fourteen Points

  Wilson's January 1918 peace plan: open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, lower trade barriers, self-determination for nations and a league of nations.

  Example. One point called for an independent Polish state with access to the sea, drawn along lines of nationality.

• First Red Scare

  A wave of fear of communists, anarchists and other radicals in 1919 and 1920 that led to mass arrests and deportations.

  Example. The 1919 Seattle general strike and a string of mail bombs that year convinced many Americans that a revolution was near.

• Immigration Act of 1924

  A law setting national-origins quotas based on the 1890 census, which sharply cut immigration from southern and eastern Europe and barred nearly all immigration from Asia.

  Example. Italy's yearly quota fell to under 4,000 people, while more than 200,000 Italians had arrived in some single years before 1914.

• Harlem Renaissance

  A flowering of Black literature, art and music centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s.

  Example. Langston Hughes's poems drew on the rhythms of blues and jazz to describe everyday Black life.

• Buying on margin

  Buying stock with a small down payment and borrowed money for the rest, so that a fall in prices could leave the buyer owing more than the stock was worth.

  Example. An investor who paid 10 percent down and borrowed the rest could be wiped out by a modest drop in the stock's price.

• Relief, recovery and reform

  The three aims of the New Deal: help for the needy right away, revival of farms and business, and changes meant to prevent another collapse.

  Example. The Securities and Exchange Commission was a reform: it set rules for stock trading to make another 1929 less likely.

• Social Security Act

  The 1935 law that created federal old-age pensions paid for by payroll taxes, along with unemployment insurance run with the states.

  Example. Monthly retirement checks began in 1940, paid for by a tax on workers' wages matched by their employers.

• Wagner Act

  The 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which protected workers' right to form unions and bargain collectively and created the National Labor Relations Board.

  Example. With the law behind them, auto workers' sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, won union recognition from General Motors in 1937.

• New Deal coalition

  The groups that voted Democratic from the 1930s on: urban workers, union members, many children of immigrants, white Southerners and, more and more, Black voters.

  Example. In 1936 most Black voters who could vote backed Roosevelt, a sharp break from their long loyalty to the party of Lincoln.

• Lend-Lease Act

  The 1941 law letting the president sell, lend or lease war supplies to any nation whose defense he judged vital to the United States.

  Example. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Lend-Lease aid was extended to the Soviets later that year.

• Japanese American incarceration

  The forced removal of about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of them U.S. citizens, from the West Coast to inland camps during World War II.

  Example. In 1988 Congress formally apologized and paid 20,000 dollars to each surviving person who had been held.

• Double V campaign

  A wartime call by Black newspapers for two victories: over fascism abroad and over racism at home.

  Example. The Pittsburgh Courier launched the campaign in 1942 after a reader asked why Black Americans should fight for a democracy that denied them full rights.